What are we thinking (or ARE we thinking)?

You know, I've been thinking about making cakes and how that is different than it used to be.  Not sure what got me on this road, but I've been on it for a week or two now.  Ages ago, if you wanted to make a cake, from my understanding, you'd get some flour, eggs, milk, sugar and butter and, if you mixed the right amount of that stuff together, you'd end up with a cake. 

Let's fast forward to now when we've gotten soooo smart and made so many advances.  I don't know what order we advanced so much in, so I'm just going to go in this direction.  We decided that whole grain flour really wasn't needed, so we have processed all the nutrients out and ended up with white paste that you can literally make glue out of.  Then, we really don't need butter; we can use shortening or margarine because we manufacture that stuff rather than take milk and churn it into butter.  It will be cheaper and everyone wins then, right?  While we're at it, let's do away with the milk and eggs to and put in manufactured stuff rather than the natural stuff.  The bottom line is important isn't it?  Well now we're making these things in labs rather than kitchens and people can't really come up to the lab to get a cake or slice of cake, so we have to add preservatives to the cake, and I love this, "to preserve freshness".  Thank goodness for this, your chemicals really can't be too fresh, can they?  What are preservatives?  These are other chemicals that inhibit the food from decomposing and, I'm sure, have some impact on us digesting the concoction we have. 

Now, our waist lines are expanding (talk about watching the bottom line), so we have to make this healthy, right?  Let's take the sugar out and put in artificial sweetener and lower the caloric value so it will now be healthy...  Man, we are SMART!  We have now taken the natural sugar out of the chemical frankenstien we've created to make it healthy!

The same goes for our spiritual lives... we introduce a little of this and a little of that until we no longer have a real walk with God.  The Bible does say all things are permitted for Christians, but we don't follow through with the rest of that verse where it says but not all things are profitable.  We take our daily Bible study out and replace it with a little extra sleep.  Then, we take out some prayer time for a few extra minutes at work.  Then we take out, well you get the picture.  Before long, we don't have the wonderful treat we had when we started.  We have something that looks like the real thing, may even smell and taste like the real thing, but is actually full of things that will literally poison us. 

Let's stop engineering our food and our walk with God.  Let's let both be combinations of natural, basic things to make a very special treat we can savor and enjoy. 

May He increase and i decrease,

Shane